The bearer of an exalted wisdom
I seized the opportunity presented by No Internet to read some of White Fragility, and found it not as terrible as I expected, but hardly a work of staggering genius. There is this air of unfalsifiability about the whole thing, because she treats any disagreement with her or challenge to anything she says as an example and illustration of WhiteFragility, which amounts to declaring herself always right from the outset. It’s quite like Freud that way. Your resistance simply shows how right I am.
John McWhorter of course makes the same point:
DiAngelo has spent a very long time conducting diversity seminars in which whites, exposed to her catechism, regularly tell her—many while crying, yelling, or storming toward the exit—that she’s insulting them and being reductionist. Yet none of this seems to have led her to look inward. Rather, she sees herself as the bearer of an exalted wisdom that these objectors fail to perceive, blinded by their inner racism. DiAngelo is less a coach than a proselytizer.
When writers who are this sure of their convictions turn out to make a compelling case, it is genuinely exciting. This is sadly not one of those times, even though white guilt and politesse have apparently distracted many readers from the book’s numerous obvious flaws.
I love that. When writers who come across as dogmatic and over-confident and smug, it’s exciting when they nevertheless make a compelling case! Hahahaha yes it is.
For one, DiAngelo’s book is replete with claims that are either plain wrong or bizarrely disconnected from reality.
There’s one place where she makes a wild claim about citizenship that gets the history completely wrong.
DiAngelo insinuates that, when white women cry upon being called racists, Black people are reminded of white women crying as they lied about being raped by Black men eons ago. But how would she know? Where is the evidence for this presumptuous claim?
It’s in the Karenpedia.
White Fragility is, in the end, a book about how to make certain educated white readers feel better about themselves. DiAngelo’s outlook rests upon a depiction of Black people as endlessly delicate poster children within this self-gratifying fantasy about how white America needs to think—or, better, stop thinking. Her answer to white fragility, in other words, entails an elaborate and pitilessly dehumanizing condescension toward Black people. The sad truth is that anyone falling under the sway of this blinkered, self-satisfied, punitive stunt of a primer has been taught, by a well-intentioned but tragically misguided pastor, how to be racist in a whole new way.
I have to say, if I were forced to choose between two writers as my only reading from now on, and those two were DiAngelo and McWhorter, I would choose the latter in a heartbeat.
“It’s in the Karenpedia.” — It’s also in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Which makes me wonder how many attitudes are shaped by fiction.
I have a language book by McWhorter on my to-read list, and maybe I’ll add one of his more political books. (Suggestions?)
I read DiAngelo’s “What Does It Mean To Be White?” and found it insightful. I picked up a copy of “White Fragility” with high hopes, but couldn’t get through it. Maybe I’d changed, maybe the book is worse, maybe both.
I liked Losing the Race but it’s been a while since I read it. I doubt you can go wrong no matter what you pick – he gives reasons for saying what he does, and he writes brilliantly.
twiliter @ 1 – well, no. It’s the other way around. The situation in To Kill a Mockingbird was absolutely a real-life one: rape accusations were a pretext for racist violence (usually lynchings) for generations after the Civil War. DiAngelo isn’t wrong that it happened, it’s just that it’s absurd and presumptuous to go from that to “when white women cry upon being called racists, Black people are reminded of white women crying as they lied about being raped by Black men eons ago.”
My “favorite” parts of White Fragility are the anecdotes. It’s like super-concentrated fremdschamen.
@2:
For those into podcasts, John McWhorter’s bi-weekly conversations with Glenn Loury are among the most sensible and level-headed commentaries on race in the US today.
Dozens of videos on Youtube, search for “The Glenn Show John McWhorter”.
In book form, the latest one, “Woke Racism” is an obvious choice.
Coel,
I used to really enjoy the Glenn & John show on Bloggingheads, but I gave it up several months ago. It got to where I could pretty much predict exactly what they’d say every episode (often, how much they dislike Ta-Nahesi Coates. I get it, dudes, you don’t like the man and resent his popularity).
“Woke Racism” is in my to-read stack. I put it in a priority position, which means I might get to it sometime within the next year, :-( Sadly, my to-read stack is huge and continues to grow. Maybe not sadly; I guess that means I won’t run out of things to read before I die. At my age, one doesn’t expect to get through such a long list.
To be fair, they did have a 5,000 year head start on you.
Ha!
(Hopefully that won’t backfire when someone sees it and decides to launch karenpedia.com.)
I listened to the Woke Racism audiobook… could listen to John McWhorter reading just about anything.
@7: Screechy:
It’s worth pointing out that, over multiple suggestions that Ta-Nahesi Coates and John McWhorter debate and engage with each other’s ideas publicly, it is always Coates who refuses.
This is the standard “no debate” policy that the Woke usually adopt, which pretty much rules them out as being serious intellectuals. (Surely McWhorter has enough standing that, if Coates were indeed a serious intellectual, he would want to engage?)
And I don’t think it’s fair to say that Loury and McWhorter “resent” Coates’s popularity in any personal sense, but they do consider that the set of ideas of which he is a leading proponent are damaging to US society and against the long-term interests of black Americans.